Ion Hazzikostas Interview
As Patch 5.2 comes to an end, developer interviews begin again! Today we are taking a look at an interview with Ion Hazzikostas (Lead Encounter Designer) by Convert to Raid.

Throne of Thunder

The team is happy with how Throne of Thunder turned out, as it really delivered on the varied and large environments, fun encounters, great art, and an interesting race for World First.

Lei Shen delivered on how great the final boss of a tier should be and is comparable to Heroic Ragnaros in terms of difficulty and structure.

The difficulty ramp up between bosses was not as smooth as it could have been, especially going from Jin'rokh to Horridon. This is something that can be improved upon in the next raid, and was addressed with hotfixes this time.

Throne of Thunder has a linear progression path, but many players missed the less linear progression that was seen in Ulduar and Icecrown. Giving players the option to work on another boss is helpful and there were areas in Throne of Thunder that could have been designed with this in mind.

Ra-Den didn't work out completely as envisioned. The sense of mystery associated with a boss that no one knows anything about is nice, making the content a bonus prize for defeating Lei Shen. It was hard to balance and test without the regular player testing, which resulted in clever use of game mechanics to defeat Ra-Den. Normally hotfixes would have been used to solve the problem, but limited attempts made it a more complicated situation.

There might have been slightly too much trash on Raid Finder difficulty, because there are no epic rewards that drop from the trash like Normal and Heroic difficulty. Trash is still an important pacing and environmental factor though, as you are progressing towards Lei Shen through his army.

Raiding

During Sunwell progression, raiding 20 hours over several days to get a world first on M'uru was unprecedented. Blizzard tried attempt limits or time limits to reduce the need to raid constantly, but it has always been an arms race between the top guilds to raid longer hours.

Limited attempts in Icecrown resulted in using alts to practice encounters before doing them on main characters, increasing the amount of time top guilds spent raiding instead of decreasing it.

The devs would like to see more organized raiding, such as the organized PuGs that existed before Raid Finder.

There is a group of players that wants to do group raiding, but they aren't well served by the current difficulty choices. This would include the friends and family type guilds that don't remove players because they aren't performing at their best. In Wrath of the Lich King, 10 player normal difficulty raiding served these players well, but there is now a gap between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty.

When 10 and 25 player had separate lockouts and different loot, they were really different difficulty levels as well. Things were somewhat easier in 10 player difficulty, as it had the lower tier of loot and should be more accessible.

Now that both 10 and 25 player difficulty offer the same loot and have a shared lockout, there is a need to ensure the difficulty is similar for both raid sizes. This eliminated the lower difficulty 10 player raids, which left some players with no content to raid in a more casual organized group.

Removing shared lockouts would just make people feel that it was mandatory to do the raid on both sizes every week to get gear faster.

Raid Finder

Raid Finder is great for letting players see content and progress their character with a more flexible schedule, but one of the best things MMOs offer is the cooperative social experience that is group raiding.

The success rates on Spine of Deathwing and Madness of Deathwing upon release in Raid Finder were about the same as they are on Lei Shen today. The success rate quickly went up on Madness of Deathwing, going from 25% during the first few weeks to 60 or 70% towards the end of the expansion.

Before the Determination buff was added, if a group failed at an encounter a few times, there wasn't much hope that anything was going to get better. This resulted in some churn in the group and continued failure. The only way to solve this problem was making the encounter easier so that groups failed less.

Determination allows the group to slowly make more progress on a boss, as well as give people who were thinking about leaving a reason to stick around.

This worked as intended, as the number of people leaving after failed attempts is significantly lower now. This also helps to reduce the amount of partially completed raids that people enter after a long queue.

Raid finder is designed to not be attractive to players that are doing most of the raid on Normal or Heroic difficulty, but for players that don't have a fixed raid group to play with.

In the past, relatively few people were able to see Arthas, Illidan, and other end bosses in raids. Raid finder allows millions of people to see the entire story.

Future / Misc

Patch 5.4 will have a raid that is similar in size to Throne of Thunder.

The team started working on Patch 5.4 as soon as they were done with work on the Patch 5.2 PTR content.

It would have been nice to have more dungeons while leveling in Pandaria, as there wasn't enough variety. This is something that can be improved upon in the future.

Requiring a group for Heroic Scenarios was done to ensure some level of communication between players, making it possible to make the content more difficult and interesting.

Paladins in Throne of Thunder
This is what they've told us: Paladins are quite useful but they feel cases like solo tanking Heroic Megaera (which was mentioned on this thread) has more to do with how encounter mechanics work than the way the class is designed. It's something the developers will work on to be more careful in the future.

Also, with patch 5.3, there'll be some adjustments to certain Paladin abilities, including a nerf to Shield of the Righteous and Glyph of the Battle Healer (which was meant for Retribution Paladins to begin with). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Characterinteresting tweet, what do you mean by this? Like old days where armor/stam values were different based on armor type?
Perhaps. Armor matters much less with so much non-physical damage. (Source)

had 10 85's 5 DS geared in Cata, have 4 90's and 1 ToT geared now. Stopped alt playing completely now. Better? Just curious.
You are comparing the final raid tier to the not-final raid tier.... (Source)It is irrelevant that they are different tiers GC, you have made alt playing not fun in MoP.
The tons of raid-geared alts didn't happen until Dragon Soul. Then players naturally expected to keep the into 5.0. (Source)
I'm not saying there weren't alts before, but the average player having 4-5 happened in Dragon Soul. (Source)

Lots of discussion lately about gear and its place. Why not simplify? Do away with bracer, belt, boots and 1 trinket?
Would that make loot feel more fun? (Source)

You say you have the best programmers, any chance they can programme the lucky coins to not give you an item you already have?
Trivially. But should they? There are downsides to getting all the gear you want as fast as you want it. (Source)

Looking at the evolution of ilvl of gear in MOP in pvp/pve, do you think it should be done differently next expansion?
We're still trying to solve letting PvE have better upgrades in later tiers without making PvP have huge catchup mechanics. (Source)
In PvE, you can just avoid the harder instances until you have better gear. In PvP, you're going to run into everybody. (Source)

Feel like BoAs take fun away, never replacing gear is lame. Love the XP buff but not trivialized content #toolatetochange
I see where you're coming from, but they're more aimed at people who feel like they're done with the gear w/ leveling thing. (Source)

Working stiff, almost no time to play now, so I don't; dailies too time consuming/no catchup method for gear. Fix next xpac?
Is the issue that you can't get into dungeons or raids, or that you want to be able to do charms, valor and rep in addition? (Source)
I ask because a major problem with Cata (we were told) was that raiders had little to do when they weren't raiding. (Source)
We added other supplemental loot systems for players looking for more to do. But players with less time felt left out. (Source)
(And before anyone suggests it, alts suffer from the same problem. Alts used to be something you could do if you had free time.) (Source)
(But now we hear from folks that they don't have time for their alts. It's tough to solve.) (Source)
It's a Catch 22 being able to provide meaningful content for players with a lot and without a lot of time. (Source)

UI / AddonsGreg, srsly. What kind of answer is that? Nothing in the game itself uses a questhelper either. Still you added it.
The game has quests though and that info wasn't available. Nothing in the game points you to coordinates. They feel optional to me. (Source)

please fix lag on Lei Shen. seems to be tied with stampede
It is, but we can't reproduce it except for players with out of date Recount or Skada. (Source)

not fun having half our 25m get d/c on bosses when a hunter decides to stampede. and this is with recount off. please fix
Are you certain none of the 25 players have recount or skada enabled? We haven't been able to reproduce that case. (Source)I never used a damage meter and lagged like crazy on Sha of Fear Heroic. Maybe something deeper... DBM? Ace?
It is definitely related to the stabled pets showing up as "unknown" and then flooding the log when the names are realized. (Source)
We're not giving up, but it's definitely one of those holycrapwhatisthisactualbug? moments. (Source)

Official LFGuild forums unusable mess. Like finding a job on craigslist with not categories, just by post date. Discouraging.
We agree with that, and the Guild Finder tool doesn't solve the problem either. (Source)
WE need a good, robust guild finding system, but you can't just throw good, robust systems together. (Source)

You 'could' does not mean you 'should'. Why would you even design abilities for bosses, if they were to be ignored?
An example is a tank swap mechanic relevant to tanks and perhaps healers that doesn't need to be shouted out to the raid. (Source)
Another is when a boss mod yells out a countdown for a minor boss debuff that adds to the healing requirements but isn't urgent. (Source)Bossmods focus your awareness when used/configured well, but they're never judicious about what's on by default.
They are better about not stealing your raid markers as much as they used to. (Source)

If you could remove 1 addon and all like it from the game, ie: Recount/skada, DBM which would you remove and why?
I'm not sure I'd want to remove any of those. Mods are generally good for the game and players like them. (Source)
Maybe a mod that is cheating (which we tend to block anyway) or something so unstable that it causes players a lot of grief. (Source)

It's not "a bit" harder than intended. It's actually much more than that. The gap between lfr and normal is HUGE. He's ignorant and willfully ignorant of his own game it seems. What I said remains true. They have no idea how to design content and build a game for their player base and they have no idea what made their game(s) successful in the first place.

Considering he said both normal modes and 10 man in general are harder than intended it doesn't mean that there will be little tuning. Expect nerfs for normal modes and nerfs for 10 man on top of that.

And you are exaggerating. Its not like the %98 of the players wait to be able to raid one day or anything..
The dedicated playerbase both in pve and pvp are %5 of the playerbase at most but they are more likely to stick around so there is nothing wrong in trying to make the experience better for these players considering they are trying to make the experience better for EVERYONE. They are not saying "screw you nm raiders, we are retarded so we are only going to design things for the %2 of our playerbase."

Competitiveness is important. Do you know how many people watch lol tourneys and play the game because it is a big esport but aren't even good players? End game is important in an MMO even more than other games because you spend a lot of time to even be able to participate in the end game events so please stop QQing everytime the devs say they give a shit about hardcore pvers and high rated pvp.

edit : there is a reason that %90 of the lol playerbase is male. Males tend to be more competitive ... Not everybody wants to play farmville.

In a nutshell, Blizzard needs to put engaging social content back in WoW. Too much focus on solo play this expansion. My long-time guildies that quit always say it was the people that kept them subbed. I make friends when pugging normals, but not in LFR.

It's not "a bit" harder than intended. It's actually much more than that. The gap between lfr and normal is HUGE. He's ignorant and willfully ignorant of his own game it seems. What I said remains true. They have no idea how to design content and build a game for their player base and they have no idea what made their game(s) successful in the first place.

And may I ask, what made their game successful in the first place? This game is more casual friendly than ever before.

Is IT me, or joining LFR for World of Warcraft as a group, with loot sharing and what not, a GREAT way to bring back small groups and family oriented guilds to feel like they can improve as a group. If its premade you can share loot, if your join solo still separate loot.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 07:11 PM ----------

GC: "I'm not saying there weren't alts before, but the average player having 4-5 happened in Dragon Soul."

IN RAID FINDER, GC your such an idiot sometimes. Gearing up alts in Raid Finder was unbelievable cool. Before you were stuck with one toon. When LFR came out you had a choice of what toon you wanted to play, now its ONE toon or nothing. I think its sorta the Do the dungeon gear up, do the LFR gear up more. Rinse and repeat per patch. Taking away Dungeons was also a TERRIBLE idea. Although I am not sure of the viability of continuing to LFR to gear up. Sounded like an interesting idea. IT seems debunked by all the comments, and personal experience. Lack of gear upgrades probably killed the whole system. Struggling in DS to get that last upgrade, now can even get more than 3.

And may I ask, what made their game successful in the first place? This game is more casual friendly than ever before.

NO it's not.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 07:17 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Rorschachs

Considering he said both normal modes and 10 man in general are harder than intended it doesn't mean that there will be little tuning. Expect nerfs for normal modes and nerfs for 10 man on top of that.

And you are exaggerating. Its not like the %98 of the players wait to be able to raid one day or anything..
The dedicated playerbase both in pve and pvp are %5 of the playerbase at most but they are more likely to stick around so there is nothing wrong in trying to make the experience better for these players considering they are trying to make the experience better for EVERYONE. They are not saying "screw you nm raiders, we are retarded so we are only going to design things for the %2 of our playerbase."

Competitiveness is important. Do you know how many people watch lol tourneys and play the game because it is a big esport but aren't even good players? End game is important in an MMO even more than other games because you spend a lot of time to even be able to participate in the end game events so please stop QQing everytime the devs say they give a shit about hardcore pvers and high rated pvp.

edit : there is a reason that %90 of the lol playerbase is male. Males tend to be more competitive ... Not everybody wants to play farmville.

If the raiding player base is only 5% then were still backwards in all of this. Creation of raids takes up far more time and effort than almost anything else in the game and catering to the 5% is almost as bad as catering to the 1. Competitiveness is the least important aspect of wow and it was the least important aspect of sc and diablo 2, in fact I'm not really sure how competitiveness can be the mot important aspect when so few players participate in the raids anyway. Not everybody accepts kill or be killed. Not everyone is a barbarian. They are exactly saying screw you to the majority of their playerbase WHO SUBSIDIZES the creation of raids they have neither the care nor the desire to participate in at the expense of content they may have enjoyed in the past (i.e Dungeons). It's BACKWARDS.

For the majority of the player base (and I would argue raiding base as well) Competition DOESn'T FUCKING MATTER. THey aren't playing this game as an arms race. Theiy're playing to chill with friends in an easy raid environment. Not be competitive in some pve esport which is lawl btw.

If the raiding player base is only 5% then were still backwards in all of this. Creation of raids takes up far more time and effort than almost anything else in the game and catering to the 5% is almost as bad as catering to the 1. Competitiveness is the least important aspect of wow and it was the least important aspect of sc and diablo 2, in fact I'm not really sure how competitiveness can be the mot important aspect when so few players participate in the raids anyway. Not everybody accepts kill or be killed. Not everyone is a barbarian. They are exactly saying screw you to the majority of their playerbase WHO SUBSIDIZES the creation of raids they have neither the care nor the desire to participate in at the expense of content they may have enjoyed in the past (i.e Dungeons). It's BACKWARDS.

For the majority of the player base (and I would argue raiding base as well) Competition DOESn'T FUCKING MATTER. THey aren't playing this game as an arms race. Theiy're playing to chill with friends in an easy raid environment. Not be competitive in some pve esport which is lawl btw.

HOW ON EARTH ARE THEY SAYING SCREW YOU TO THE MAJORITY? explain me that first.

And for the majority of the playerbase, competition does matter because it gives you hype. I hope you know how important hype is in games in general. People play this game to chill yes ; but that doesn't mean that people spending years on this game should be unhappy with that decision and like I said they are trying to cater to everybody.

No game on earth created the majority of the content for their casual players because then games would be boring and pointless. THERE HAS TO BE AN END GAME. Even if people won't be seeing that end game its important that it exists because if players could just chill and do every single thing to do including things like heroic raiding and getting gladiator titles there would be no point to playing this game for so many people.

Just giving away everything to everbody is not a sign of a good game so please understand that first.

And we get the usual: everything is working as intended, lfr is great, tier is great, disregard people dropping out by millions and keep on paying, don't forget to realm transfer all your toons as we live in denial and we will not merge servers but we'd like to see more organized raiding. Jolly

It's not "a bit" harder than intended. It's actually much more than that. The gap between lfr and normal is HUGE. He's ignorant and willfully ignorant of his own game it seems. What I said remains true. They have no idea how to design content and build a game for their player base and they have no idea what made their game(s) successful in the first place.

And yet it's not even THAT hard if you know what your doing, but most people have been doing LFR it seems where falling asleep still gets you through.

Honestly the the best solution for them is to add a 3rd raid difficulty and make it harder (and make mechanics matter) then LFR, but easier then Normal. Then they won't have to nerf normal by 10-15% anymore because there is already a nerfed mode. Also pugs/alt runs would be happen more, and guilds who hit brick walls can turn the difficulty down to clear ... kinda like you do when trying to kill heroic bosses and time is running out for the week.

The only flaw is people will be able to clear content faster, but you already can in LFR, so gate this "easier" difficulty the same way you gate LFR. Tons of positives and no negatives.

Going back to the Wrath models (10's being easier) will piss off a lot of 10 man radiers and make a lot of people quit (including me), but adding a 3rd difficulty harder then LFR will make people happy without upsetting anyone. Plus I would probably log on more and run that with my alts/friends.

If the raiding player base is only 5% then were still backwards in all of this. Creation of raids takes up far more time and effort than almost anything else in the game and catering to the 5% is almost as bad as catering to the 1. Competitiveness is the least important aspect of wow and it was the least important aspect of sc and diablo 2, in fact I'm not really sure how competitiveness can be the mot important aspect when so few players participate in the raids anyway. Not everybody accepts kill or be killed. Not everyone is a barbarian. They are exactly saying screw you to the majority of their playerbase WHO SUBSIDIZES the creation of raids they have neither the care nor the desire to participate in at the expense of content they may have enjoyed in the past (i.e Dungeons). It's BACKWARDS.

For the majority of the player base (and I would argue raiding base as well) Competition DOESn'T FUCKING MATTER. THey aren't playing this game as an arms race. Theiy're playing to chill with friends in an easy raid environment. Not be competitive in some pve esport which is lawl btw.

The game needs carrots on sticks to keep people playing.
Its not about how many actually see exclusive content, its about how many want to see it. This game badly needs more of it.
What is wrong for people who are better/put more time into game getting more out of it? It works everywhere else in life why not here?

HOW ON EARTH ARE THEY SAYING SCREW YOU TO THE MAJORITY? explain me that first.

The majority of the player base doesn't raid and yet the developers insist on making content that they don't do, effectively robbing peter to pay paul. In addition to this they make 2/3 modes of that content unavailable for people who would potentially be interested in it. It's a massive fuck you.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 10:08 PM ----------

Originally Posted by NigelGurney

The game needs carrots on sticks to keep people playing.
Its not about how many actually see exclusive content, its about how many want to see it. This game badly needs more of it.
What is wrong for people who are better/put more time into game getting more out of it? It works everywhere else in life why not here?

Because people are exactly looking to escape from life when they play warcraft. Not replicate the experience they have in doldrum and in tedium at their jobs. World of Warcraft: The McDonalds Crew Trainer experience would never fucking work and nobody would buy it.

Well there's 2 ways for them to go - either nerf 10's to a sensible level, whereby you don't need to basically outgear them to kill half the bosses, OR add a new difficulty level, which you can switch on and off for different bosses (to suit your raids composition).

The "correct" difficulty setting was BT/MH/Uld/ICC. Easy bosses early on (first few bosses should be free kills more or less), but a gradually increasing difficulty curve (RoS, Archimonde, Mimiron, Professor, etc). It's nice to see they realised their mistake with Horridon's crazy dps requirements in the first few weeks, but this really needs to not happen again. It was the same mistake as Garalon, which took FOREVER to be fixed. How can they possibly make the EXACT same mistake 2 raids in a row?!

This is what makes my head spin. They had a really successful formula with using dungeons as a catch up mechanism, and most people I know enjoyed the ability to use this path to gear up alts, but they decided not to have any extra 5 man content post initial release in MoP. So I ask myself why did they make this decision? All I can come up with is that they wanted to prove how successful LFR is by forcing people to use it if they want to gear up, then they can say "Look how many people are using LFR" and pat themselves on the back for coming up with a great idea. It's easy to say it would have been nice to have more dungeons while leveling and it would have been even nicer to have more dungeons in one of the patches.

The result of these decisions for me was that I leveled my alts for professions and have them all sitting, basically unplayed in 463 gear. I raid on my main, I have no desire to burn myself out on that content by doing it on alts in LFR. It's not fun for me and the people in there aren't enjoyable. With 5-mans, I could go in to content with 5 friends anytime I wanted and do something. There's no content available right now that I can do with a few of my buddies....sorry Heroic Scenarios aren't what I'm looking for. So how do I play WoW now. I log on to raid and log off. I have no interest in doing more dailies or one of the original heroic dungeons yet again that I've seen 30 times already. There is NO reason for me to play other than my 2 nights of raiding.

I'm fine with the existence of LFR, but did it really have to come at the expense of a catch up progression system of JP and dungeons that in my opinion worked very well for two expansion? I'm gonna argue no and I think sub numbers over the next year will support that argument.

They neglected dungeons because it required "too much work". Then they shove dailies down everyone's throats as "content". Dailies = low effort, low quality content from Blizzard.

They neglected dungeons because it required "too much work". Then they shove dailies down everyone's throats as "content". Dailies = low effort, low quality content from Blizzard.

Pretty much. Instead of dungeons which required dev time, they gave us LFR which could be scaled off existing content. Then they tell us how great it is and that if we wanna gear up alts, that's our path to do it. Sorry, but it sucks. Not only does it diminish my enjoyment of my regular raid if I'm doing the same content on alts, but there is zero interaction and when you are one of 25 people facerolling content that is designed to require no skill, you don't feel like you're playing a social game. It also requires a longer time investment than dungeons did, and one that is much more open ended. If I had 45 minutes to play, I knew I could log on, hit up guild for a group and do a quick dungeon with people I enjoyed the company of before I had to log off. Now, if I wanna do something that has a chance of upgrading my character I can do the same damned dailies I ground to death on my main, or hope LFR queue pops and maybe we get one boss dead before I have to call it a day. Not to mention that I'm a faceless nothing in a group of 24 other faceless nothings in an LFR group. No one chats, rarely is a positive word spoken and if anything goes wrong the faceless mob turns angry in a hurry.

What made WoW strong was the social aspect, yet every move Blizzard makes seems to take the requirement to make friends out of the game. What kept people coming back was the people they knew in game, not that quality of the content, and if you remove all the content that requires you to get to know your fellow players, you lose the people who play for that reason. For example, I hadn't done the Isle of Thunder dailies yet and it was a couple of weeks in. I had a friend who I hadn't seen for a very long time log on, so we decided we'd go explore together. After an hour of getting queued for solo scenerio after solo scenario, we both had to go and our time playing together consisted of "gee, I hope this is the last one". We got to accept the quests together...woohoo. If Blizzard insists on making the game a solo experience (and even tho LFR requires 25 people, it is solo content imo), then the game is dead as far as I'm concerned.

The majority of the player base doesn't raid and yet the developers insist on making content that they don't do, effectively robbing peter to pay paul. In addition to this they make 2/3 modes of that content unavailable for people who would potentially be interested in it. It's a massive fuck you.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 10:08 PM ----------

Because people are exactly looking to escape from life when they play warcraft. Not replicate the experience they have in doldrum and in tedium at their jobs. World of Warcraft: The McDonalds Crew Trainer experience would never fucking work and nobody would buy it.

That's the kind of thinking that helps remove all immersion from the game for the sake of convenience.
Its not tedium,its giving people goals to aim for and rewarding them for it. Its progression and its critical to RPG's.

There is a group of players that wants to do group raiding, but they aren't well served by the current difficulty choices. This would include the friends and family type guilds that don't remove players because they aren't performing at their best. In Wrath of the Lich King, 10 player normal difficulty raiding served these players well, but there is now a gap between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty.

This is exactly what I was saying to a guildie just two nights ago. Our raid eventually broke up for exactly this reason.

The devs would like to see more organized raiding, such as the organized PuGs that existed before Raid Finder.

What's this I don't even......

Ye - exactly. Few months back they were saying they SPECIALLY focused on making Normal raids harder and less pug friendly They change their opinions on things more often than they blink their eyes at this point.

---------- Post added 2013-05-16 at 11:40 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Mekh

This is exactly what I was saying to a guildie just two nights ago. Our raid eventually broke up for exactly this reason.

The real issue here is that BLizzard made NORMAL raids harder (they admit to that) and then leave no real content for more social - less hardcore guilds to do other than the least social cotent you will ever see.... LFR.....

This was pointed to them WAYYY before MOP that this would lead to social aspects of the game dying down within few months. They yet again ignored that like with so many other things in this expansion. They thought they knew best - and ignored every person that dared to point out all the flaws. Thats why WOW is now down to TBC sub numbers and there will be much bigger losses seen this year just because of the general ignorance and arrogance of the dev team.

Normal raid content in the game should be so that every day player can enjoy it with friends. It doesn't need to be lower 10 man ilvl for that. THEN we have Heroic content if ppl want to push it furhter. Thats for the more hardcore and "less" friends type of gameplay. Not complicated.... but BLizzard yet again managed to screw it up.

I suspect they may consider making normal modes (10 and 25 man) slightly easier - or at least take much more care scaling the dungeon bosses in order. ToT was all over the place, with some rather large roadblocks for many people.

Also, they won't remove LFR. Despite many claims, it was never the reason for the 'death' of PUGS. They still happened during Cata for Baradin Hold. The main problem is the difficulty - most pugs in Wrath only did ToC and the first wing of ICC, and most pugs in TBC did Kara and maybe Gruul/Mag. Many pugs would fail in normal Mogu'shan Vaults, even with ToT raid finder gear!

I suspect their overall plan will be to make the first half, third or quarter (depending on size) of each normal mode raid (or tier) considerably easier then the rest of it. Thus it gives social guilds a benchmark they can farm until they have the gear to go further, pugs won't be overwhelmed with roadblock bosses and more serious raiding guilds won't be effected since they tend to blast through most of normal mode bosses anyway.

In ToT terms, this would mean up to Council would be easier and after that the difficulty ramps up. Just as an example.

Some people might complain that 'casuals' are being catered to, but honestly why should people care what others are doing when they are still far below the benchmark?

Finally having a 'Looking For PUG' function in the UI might be nice, where you can advertise and search for raids on your server being formed, with class requirements/requests and handy quickcheck functions for seeing people's achievements and gear, and status on the loot system and progression the raid is current at. And being able to invite Real ID friends from cross server would make this much easier also. Thus its LFR with more control over who is in your group, higher difficulty and superior loot along with a more social feel since it'll be with people on your server or friends list.

They neglected dungeons because it required "too much work". Then they shove dailies down everyone's throats as "content". Dailies = low effort, low quality content from Blizzard.

Ye - ofc its the cheapest way to create 10 dailies and call it content and drag it on for months.

But the reason why we dont have any dungeons now is that the entire dungeon and raid team are focusing on Raids this time around. Thats the ONLY reason why we have few extra bosses in MOP raids. They cut one aspect of the game to add to another. Thats not acceptable and BLizzard should have known better. But like with so much of this expansion... they didn't.

Just wait next expansion. We be back to 6 boss raids and few dungeons when the real fix is to have 1 dungeon crew and one raid crew that the players that have payed for this game for 8 years REALLY deserve.